


Cry Wolf

by th_esaurus



Category: Hell or High Water (2016)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Incest, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-16
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-08-09 05:41:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7788871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tanner spent the rest of the day in Post, drinking and making enemies of the women there. You drove in your father's pickup to collect him, late into the evening, but only made it half the way into town; he was walking a swaggering line down the dusty road, swaying and hollering jukebox tunes. He must have wandered forty miles. His boots were still stained with your father's blood.</p><p>You were not angry with him and you could not be not proud of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cry Wolf

You were sixteen when Tanner killed your father.

You went out to the fringe of the ranch on the morning after it happened, absently pressing your teeth against the scab on your bottom lip. Your father had dealt you a sharp backhand the week before, and you'd ricocheted into the door jamb, caught your lip between the wood and your front teeth, burst it like a peach skin. Syrupy blood oozing down your chin. Your mother had flinched, a spasm running along her bones. Tanner had not been in the room at the time, but you heard them fighting on the porch later, Tanner and your father. Your father's heavy boot slamming into Tanner's stomach.

You counted the thuds like the seconds between thunder and lightning.

And then, when there had been a long enough silence, you took the packet of cigarettes you kept hidden in a VHS box out onto the porch, and helped Tanner to his feet, helped him to the creaky deck chairs, and lit a cigarette, and held it out for him to take furious puffs on. His mouth was too swollen and bruised to hold it between his lips. You stole a few drags. You had started smoking the same year as Tanner, though less brazenly.

You tasted his blood on the filter, and waited for him to start his low, pissant vitriol about your father. But it never came. He seemed like he was thinking.

Your father's body had been taken out of the field, but it was impossible to extricate the blood from the dust. Tanner had shot him through the neck. There was also a bullet wedged into the fence, just to the left of the mess. Tanner, you knew intimately, was a near-perfect shot - only good for shooting and drinking, your father always said. He had used the stray bullet as a loose defence, to prove his bad aim, to prove the whole debacle was a tragic accident.

You knew it was a warning shot.

They kept Tanner overnight in a cell, questioned him in the morning. Every cop in the station knew your family; knew Tanner's toothy, insincere smile, the shake in your mother's voice, the colour of your father's bruises upon your skin.

It was recorded for posterity as a hunting accident. "Fucking coyotes," people muttered, looking at your split lip, when you told them how it happened.

You spat on the muddy bloodstain where your father had died. And then you felt ashamed for it.

Tanner spent the rest of the day in Post, drinking and making enemies of the women there. You drove in your father's pickup to collect him, late into the evening, but only made it half the way into town; he was walking a swaggering line down the dusty road, swaying and hollering jukebox tunes. He must have wandered forty miles. His boots were still stained with your father's blood.

You were not angry with him and you could not be proud of him. He slept in the truck while you drove. Grabbed at your wrist when you shook him awake.

He crawled into bed with you. He had his own bed - wooden frame and all, while yours was a mattress laid upon the floor on the other side of the little room - and had not spooned against you like this since you were children. He was twenty now, a man, too old for childish sweetness and eschewed responsibilities. You elbowed him feebly in the chest as he wrapped himself around you, complaining of the heat, his sweat, his smell, his stubble. But Tanner hushed you, and buried his face in the nape of your neck.

"Nobody's gonna lay a finger on you, little brother," Tanner murmured, and his words seemed to tattoo themselves onto your skin.

Some way through the night you must have rolled over in your sleep, as you woke with your head tucked under Tanner's chin and his calloused hands clutching at your waist. He smelled of beer and rot.

Your father was dead. You were sixteen.

*

You quit school later that year.

Your mother had always done an okay job managing the ranch, when your father left her to it, but she was perpetually short of farmhands. You had always assumed your summers would be dedicated to the ranch, but an overweight man in a bolo tie and a Stetson had come to your school to talk uncomfortably about what a bright future young men like you could have in the drilling industry. So that had been in the back of your mind, as something—away from all this.

But then your father died and you quit school and Tanner went off the rails and your mother needed you full time on the ranch. It stayed in the back of your mind.

You got strong, fast, and too tall for your threadbare mattress. Tanner had not moved out, so you could not take his bed. Looking at Tanner was like looking in a fairground mirror. He stayed short, got stocky, fat from beer around his jaw and belly. He was absent from the ranch in the daylight hours, during which time you got to know the heifers, learnt how to hitch the tiller up to the tractor, figured out how much hay you could carry before your arms shook.

Your mother laid dinner out for three people for a long time, until one day, without fanfare, she fed herself and fed you and did not put a third plate out at the table.

You left half of your meal covered, in the fridge, for Tanner to pick at later.

He tended to come home after midnight, and was not often alone. "Pipe down," he always hissed, when the girls he brought back with him started up a tipsy giggle. "Hush it, my little brother's sleepin'—"

You were not sleeping. You rarely slept until he did, though he lost interest and consciousness fast after he had taken his fill. You had a dull recognition that Tanner was ugly but wily, and his litany of dime-store pick up lines had a crusty charm that would have let you down had you ever tried them.

You were not so interested in girls. You had put your hand down the panties of a plain blonde at school, in the girls' locker room, because she had said, "You don't wanna?" and you had not wanted to make her feel bad; but it was not a memory you savoured. Tanner, late that same night, had grabbed your hand and pressed it to his nose and inhaled with a pig-like snort, laughing and wrestling you on the mattress and asking if you got your dick wet, didya, didya Toby, or did she give you her mouth instead?

He had put your fingers in his mouth and sucked them for half a second, as if he could taste her.

Dropped your hand, laughing.

You knew what Tanner sounded like when he came. It was not so different a noise to the one he'd made when your father kicked him in the gut.

This went on for some years. You supposed Tanner was making money in the daytime, somewhere, though he never talked of a job. When you visited Tanner in jail, many years later, in one of his verbose moods, he told you dully that he had stolen both your mother's wedding and engagement rings, and pawned them for far too little. She had assumed them lost down the waste disposal. "She didn't need no trinkets from that son'bitch anyways," he spat.

You thought, to yourself, it was not his judgement to make.

At the tail end of your teens, three things happened: firstly, a man from the Texas Midlands Bank came to have a chat with your mother - and only your mother. You were dismissed from the room, and Tanner was already out.

Secondly, you met Debbie at a cattle market where you were trying to sell an underweight bull that had not sired a single calf in the past two years. You were a bad liar, and she liked that you weren't full of shit, and the two of you had sex in a motel that smelled like a chicken coop.

Thirdly, after you had slept with Debbie but before she called to tell you she was pregnant, Tanner brought a boy home with him.

It was maybe 3am, and you kept your eyes shut the whole time. It made their noises and whispers stark, though Tanner was making a bold effort to keep the boy quiet. No coy giggles from this one; down to it. You could not guess his age. He started out sucking Tanner's dick noisily, wetly, and you heard Tanner snap, "Hey, _hey_ —" and smack the kid sharply, his palm catching plenty of skin.

You wanted to plug your ears. Couldn't; it would give you away.

It seemed to go on much longer than when Tanner fucked his girls. He was having a hard time coming. Frustration catching in his throat. "Come _on_ ," Tanner growled.

You shifted just slightly, to press at least one ear against your thin pillow, trying to pretend you were half deaf. And as you turned, the floorboards under you moaned, as they always had since you were little. You heard it like a shotgun round, loud and obvious. You thought you heard a hitch in Tanner's breath. You kept absolutely still.

The boy didn't break his stride and a few seconds later, you heard your brother come.

The boy spat immediately on the floor.

"You little fuck," Tanner hissed. "Clean that shit up and get out of here."

The boy kicked you in his haste to get out of the house, but you pretended not to notice. Pretended to be asleep. Tanner, too, pretended for a good hour or so. And then he said, "Toby?"

You did not answer. You couldn't.

You did not answer and did not sleep and were still awake at six in the morning, when Tanner pulled on his boots and left for his daily duties. Whatever they were.

There was a badly scrubbed mark on the bare wooden floor where the boy had spit up his come, and you fetched a damp cloth, and got on your knees, and cleaned it properly.

Tanner did not come home for two nights, and then it was back to girls. Thick charm and lilting laughter. The sound of buoyant breasts and Tanner's thrusting hips. Familiar sounds.

You slept okay.

*

By the time Debbie fell pregnant with your second son, you figured you should ask her to marry you. "I guess so," Debbie shrugged.

Tanner did not like Debbie. He said she looked like the kind of girl who'd been fingered by an uncle or cousin as a child and never got over it.

You did not like Debbie all that much either, but felt you owed her.

She had a small house not far outside Jayton, which she had inherited from her parents and looked after badly. You visited her and your boy Jason there at least once a week, but now you packed up what little was truly yours from the ranch and moved in with her. While looking for a bottle opener in the kitchen drawers, you found a pile of opened letters addressed to your mother from the Texas Midlands Bank. But she shooed you out the door before you could mention it.

She told you over the telephone two weeks later that Tanner had moved out. Just packed a bag and didn't come home one night. Didn't even tell her goodbye.

When your mother died, a decade or so later, you were not surprised to find no trace of Tanner in her Will. Your family was good at holding grudges.

Still, Tanner met you often in Jayton for beer and pool. He was decent at bowling, too, but embarrassed your son with his whooping and hollering whenever he hit a strike, to the point where Jason asked sometimes if they _had_ to go see Uncle Tanner. So he began to stay at home with Debbie, and you and Tanner fell in and out of the bars in town, and it didn't matter which of you drove home because you were both drunk.

Tanner mentioned he was staying in a little trailer, about twenty miles from the ranch. Jayton was not exactly close by.

You finally got that drilling job, made half a living with it. You and Debbie did not sleep in the same bed, and she swelled up with her second pregnancy; sore feet, she said, and a short temper. Sometimes you would creep out in the late evening, Tanner idling the car at the end of the drive, and the two of you would drive out to the casinos near the border. Book a motel room for the night. You liked the simplicity of the slot machines; Tanner liked the flair of cards.

You liked to look at Tanner as you drove. He was approaching his thirties badly. His hairline was receding, his fine hair bleached from the sun and looking even more thin for it. Both of you had a Texan complexion, but he looked perpetually ruddy where you were tan. You looked like brothers only in the brightness of your eyes. You did not think of Tanner as a warning of what you could become. Just a fork in the path you'd both started down.

"Admiring the view?" Tanner asked, smirking. Under his sunglasses, his eyes flicked between you and the road.

"You look like shit," you told him.

"Fuck you," he said brightly. You'd seen him punch a man for lesser slights, hard enough to loosen teeth.

You lost money, though not a great amount, and Tanner laughed on the drive home when he asked how badly Debbie was gonna chew you out. "You got a girl yet?" You asked, deflecting.

"Every girl," Tanner whistled.

You hesitated a long time. "Boys too?" You meant nothing by it. Insinuated nothing, your voice perfectly even. It was curiosity. You wanted Tanner content.

Tanner brought the car to a jarring halt, swerving onto the dusty dip between road and field. He threw open the door before the car even rolled to a stop, slamming it behind him and marching off into the brittle grass, throwing his hands around and cussing and spitting. You let him, did not chase him. Got out your side of the car and waited by it as it clicked and hissed from the sudden stop, rubbing the back of your neck in the hot sun. It took Tanner ten minutes or more to run out of steam.

"Get in the fucking car," he yelled as he stormed back.

You got in the fucking car.

He dropped you back at Debbie's and sped off, and you apologised and you kissed her forehead and you told her it wouldn't happen again.

Your father had said that to your mother more than once.

Here you were saying it to your wife.

It was only Tanner who never voiced his regrets. Kept them tamped down inside. If they were there at all.

*

The month after your second son was born, the county sentenced Tanner to twelve years for armed robbery and aggravated assault. The judge said blithely that he would, for better or worse, most probably be out within ten.

You had not known that Tanner had never held down a job in his life longer than two months. He lived rent free in his silver trailer in exchange for keeping the owner's swathe of farmland clear of coyotes and hogs; but otherwise he had been a common criminal.

An uncomfortable weight seemed to settle in the base of your stomach, and did not leave the whole while Tanner was in jail.

You visited him when you could. Things were already going downhill with Debbie, though you held on for another few years, up until your eldest son started high school and the youngest could walk and talk. Your mother's health began to tail off, as well, and when Debbie told you over a steak dinner that she was thinking of divorcing you, you did not argue. You wanted to move back to the ranch. Look after your mother. She had been alone long enough.

Tanner hollered out a _Halle-fuckin'-lujah_ when you told him you and Debbie were splitting, and a bitter looking guard told him to shut the fuck up once and for all. You suspected Tanner's mouth had got him into trouble in jail. The corner of it was lightly bruised, and he had a cold sore on his top lip, just under the bristles of a handlebar moustache he was growing.

You wondered what other sort of scrapes Tanner's mouth got him into and out of. But you knew better than to ask. Barely asked Tanner how he was doing. Just let him talk until time ran out.

Tanner had been caught robbing a pawn shop. It was, he said, the same one where he sold your mother's wedding rings, so that's how you learnt about that. The rings were long gone, and the owner was recalcitrant about handing over the register keys, and Tanner had got pissy and clubbed him in the face with the butt of his gun until the man's nose cracked and gushed blood on the floor and Tanner's hands. "He made more noise than Paw," Tanner said, not keeping his voice low at all. "'S why the cops showed up."

He had testified in court, nasal and petty, and told the jury that Tanner was a good-for-nothing thug. A psychiatrist also coldly proclaimed that Tanner had some sociopathic tendencies, and a stunning lack of empathy for his fellow man.

You had always considered Tanner headstrong, but never stopped to pick apart what that actually meant.

Tanner got older in prison, and you got older outside of it. People had told your mother, when you were younger, that you'd be handsome if you weren't quite so shy. She still called you a pretty young man, but she was going blind in her left eye and was, by this point, pissing through a catheter, so you didn't hold her opinion on aesthetics in much stead. You only noticed that you, like Tanner, had been absently cultivating a moustache when Debbie pointed out that it looked awful. She said this in between asking you when the child support money was coming, and reminding you to go to your son's ball game on the Labor Day weekend.

You drove out to Tanner's trailer once. It was shabby and small, with the yellowing curtains pulled. You walked up the few steps to the front door, the metal clanging under your boots and, stupidly, thought about knocking. Even the doorway seemed miniature. You couldn't imagine Tanner fitting through it. Not because he was fat - he had lost some weight in jail, though he would never be gaunt - but because he was too—

Too much.

Too much to be contained like this. In this little silver bullet, or in his jail cell, or in half a room on the family ranch.

The field where the trailer sat was vast in the Texan way, nothing but fields and sky and a dusty horizon. You felt like Tanner would be better sleeping out here, under the vast stars. He could use them as target practice.

You scuffed over your footprints as you trudged back to the car. No sign you'd been here. Even though Tanner had another five years to sit and stew in jail.

They night, you fed your mother her medication, the sleeping pill last of all. Then you went to your room - you had always considered it Tanner's room, with your brother magnanimously carving out a space in it for you - and stood in the doorway and stared. It was tiny and bare and sad. Just like the rest of the ranch. Mismatched wood and a sole grubby window and too-small furniture, fine for kids but you had become men in this room.

It had not occurred to you, since you left Debbie, to sleep on the bedframe. You'd still been curling up on the mattress every night. Your feet hanging over the edge below the ankle.

Carefully, as though he would burst in and box your ears for it, you lowered yourself down onto Tanner's bed. The sheets had not been changed for years, and smelt musty and foul; but familiar too, if not exactly comforting. Maybe they had always smelled that way, and only distance made you notice it. You lay on your front, your face buried in the thin pillow, feeling the parts of the mattress where the springs had given under Tanner's ministrations. The divot of his hips a little higher than yours.

You inhaled hard, and remembered, clear as anything—

Christ, you must have been—seventeen? No, your father was still around. Fifteen, then.

It was late, and you had been quietly jerking off. You'd gotten good by then, at doing it silently, breathing through your nose and palming your dick rather than thrusting, so the sheets didn't rustle so obviously.

Tanner was not asleep, you could tell by his breathing, but you kept at it.

"Toby," Tanner said, hushed.

You'd stopped, stricken.

"You rubbin' one out?" Tanner asked. He didn't sound mocking, though you could never fully tell. He was just asking.

"Yeah," you mumbled.

"That's okay," Tanner said, and when he didn't say anything more for a long time, you carried on.

You could hear him turn over. Heard the hitch in his breath as he got his hand around his dick. He wasn't as adept at keeping it quiet; not brazen like he was with his girls, but still he made throaty grunts and skin-slick noises.

You remember that he came first, and then he listened until you followed.

"What were you thinking of?" He asked, a little while after.

"I dunno. Nothing, I guess."

That was all that happened. Tanner had turned back over and gone to sleep; slept in this bed, jerked off in this bed, screwed in this bed. Fucked a boy's mouth, here, in this bed. If you lifted your neck slightly you could still see the discoloured mark on the floorboards.

You shifted your hips enough to undo your belt, shirk off your jeans, pulled your tee over your head. Balled them all up and tossed them across to your side off the room. You slid your boxers off too. When you got under the blanket, a layer of dust rose and settled again, made you cough.

You slept, fitfully, in Tanner's bed.

You did not visit Tanner in jail for the next seven months.

*

The week Tanner got out, a carnival passed through ten miles out from the ranch, and you asked Debbie and the boys to come celebrate. It was a poor idea and you knew it.

"He's a shit influence on you and a shit influence on the boys," she said, but your sons were energetic and listless and needed the entertainment. You promised to keep Tanner in line, and you both knew this was empty: you had always tagged along with him.

He'd been made haggard from jail, but not diminished. He was loud, his voice carrying across the noisome evening, and he chain-smoked all night, and showed up tipsy and continued to drink. You sat next Jason on the one rickety rollercoaster, and did not exchange any words. Tanner sat behind with your littlest, Randy, and got him to whoop and wave his arms at Debbie as you lapped her on the sidelines. She chewed the skin of her thumbnail until it bled, and did not listen when your young son begged to ride it again with his uncle.

Tanner soaked up the wild open air like a bushfire; his wide eyes reflected the twinkling lights and he sang along off-key with every other tune they blared over the tinny sound system. He hollered so hard along with Free Bird that you thought he'd make himself retch. He spilled his beer over his jeans, and bought two more bottles to replace it. He paid buck after buck on the rigged games, to win a sour-faced stuffed bear he said looked the spit of you. "Always so fuckin' serious," he said. Debbie moved the boys away from him. He did not win the bear, and swore at the kid running the stand, and threw a foam ball hard at his shoulder.

"Cool it, Tanner," you muttered.

"We're having a good time, little brother!" he sang back, grinning too wide and sloshing beer out of his bottle again. "I'm out here in the big wide world with my favourite brother and his favourite ex-wife!"

Debbie, upset, was moving the boys away from you both. "That's it," Tanner yelled after her, spiteful. "You put the fear of God into those boys, Deb!"

"You gotta eat," you tried to tell Tanner. "Drinking on an empty stomach—"

"Fuck you," he snapped. "Nobody ever got drunk on beer."

You trailed him around the stands again while he complained noisily about the lack of cards games, the lack of hard spirits, the lack of pert girls. He fell into that train of thought, then, and tailed a coy redhead with denim short shorts and freckles across her chin; crooned Kenny Rogers at her and stared openly at her ass.

She did not laugh, and she was with a man who had almost a foot on Tanner.

"Hey now," Tanner said to the bruiser, barely upright by this point. "Don't get your panties in a twist, I ain't mind sharing."

In truth you had never much been one for fighting. You'd rough-housed with Tanner plenty as kids, defended yourself at high school. Sparring with Debbie was always verbal; you would not hit her, though you'd smashed a china plate against the dinner table once in anger. You were no diplomat, but if you could avoid anything coming to blows, you'd do it.

But that west Texas bruiser raised his fist to your big brother.

You don't remember the details of it.

Distantly, you heard Debbie screaming. Hands were grabbing your chest and thighs, Tanner was cackling, laughing so hard he really did throw up on the dry grass. Three men were pulling you back. Your knuckles were sore and soaked with blood. The redhead was crying.

You remember hearing his cheekbone crack and you remember you didn't stop punching.

"My brother!" Tanner yelled, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, half crawling to you. "My beautiful little brother! Don't take shit from nobody! Don't need protecting from anything!"

You looked down at him, panting hard, and his eyes were animal.

He seemed to see the same in you.

*

You drove Tanner back to his shit trailer that night. You'd been told, not asked, to leave.

You hoped Tanner would spend the drive unconscious, but he was awake, still drinking the dregs of his last beer. He was near silent, though. Subdued now, without an audience to goad him. He leant on the rolled down window, his elbow and most of his head out in the slipstream. His eyes were on the sky. Watching the fixed point of the stars.

You thought about wheedling Tanner into coming back to the ranch with you that night. Didn't want to leave him alone with his thoughts and his beer and his guns. But you didn't want him to wake your mother, expend what little energy she had, and she had not seen him in a decade; would not appreciate seeing him like this.

So you pulled up to the trailer, and waited to see him up to the door.

Tanner did not move for a long time.

"I love you, little brother," he murmured. He was not looking at you.

"I know it, Tanner."

"I do love you, Toby. You're all I got."

"That ain't—"

"Shut up," Tanner snapped. He turned, all at once, and got his hands on your shoulders, and you were two grown men in a car that suddenly seemed too small. All of Texas was spread out on either side of you, but you and Tanner were trapped in this little, cloying box. "You don't. You don't know. You've tried, fuck, you've looked—you look after Ma, you got your boys, you got a legacy—" He stopped for a bitter laugh. "All I've got is a fucking criminal record."

You hadn't known it had bothered him.

You put your hand on his wrist, tight and comforting. You weren't much practiced at smiling, but you tried now, for Tanner.

He pulled you in, and pushed your mouths together. Both of you with days-old stubble that rasped and scraped. Perhaps he had not meant to put his tongue against your lips, perhaps it was the toxic mix of fraternity and drink. But he did. Got his heavy tongue in your mouth, by habit, slunk his thick fingers against the back of your neck and pressed you in close.

You let him.

You let him, you opened up your mouth. You kissed Tanner. Put your hand on the inside of his thigh.

"Fuck," he hissed, breaking away. A spool of spittle threaded between your mouths for a split-second; snapped, vanished.

Nobody out here to see you but those looming stars.

He nudged his forehead against yours, left his sweat on your skin.

"Tanner," you said.

"G'night, little brother," he managed. Bolted from the car. Went up the croaking steps to his trailer. Slammed the door behind him.

You sat where you were, unmoving, for a minute or two longer. Then you jerked open the car door and threw up wetly on the dark ground beside the front wheel. You covered it up with dust and dirt as best you could, shovelling it with the side of your boot.

And then you went home.

*

Your mother passed away when you were thirty-five.

*

Your older brother, Tanner, got himself shot through the head.

You were still thirty-five.


End file.
